Daniel Allington (University of the West of England), Sarah Brouillette (Carleton University) and David Golumbia (Virginia Commonwealth University) published “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities” in the Los Angeles Review of Books, arguing that the digital humanities have “played a leading role in the corporatist restructuring of the humanities.” Positioning DH against the more traditional form of humanities scholarship, which relies on “painstaking individual scholarship” with “less immediate economic application,” the authors claim:

What Digital Humanities is not about, despite its explicit claims, is the use of digital or quantitative methodologies to answer research questions in the humanities. It is, instead, about the promotion of project-based learning and lab-based research over reading and writing, the rebranding of insecure campus employment as an empowering “alt-ac” career choice, and the redefinition of technical expertise as a form (indeed, the superior form) of humanist knowledge.

The article goes on to engage with several debates within literary studies, with a special focus on the development of DH within the English department at the University of Virginia.

The Los Angeles Review of Books has also featured several interviews in its recent series covering the digital humanities.

Since Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia’s article appeared, several responses have been shared and are listed below: